For years, operators of websites have presented content in a mostly blind fashion. While knowing what is intended to be seen, operators weren't exactly sure how content would be rendered for the website in an application (e.g., a document browser) on a client device and exactly how those users would interact with the content. As a result, operators may be challenged to determine the exact user experience on a client device for accessing documents presented for a website. It may be difficult for operators to determine the sequence of events for a user attempting to view the content on a client device. As such, some operators may be unable to determine a sequence of events leading up to problems with accessing content on a client device.
In the past decade, advancing technology has enabled various methods to capture the user experience in delivery of electronic documents (e.g., delivery of webpages in a client browser) in an online-environment (e.g., an Internet environment). This digital experience analytics can provide deep level insights into customer behavior, website performance, and identification of improvement opportunities for specific customer segments. Such techniques can enable discovery of points of failure, successes, and trends in which may then be used to optimize the design of the business's operations and service.
One technology used in the early discoveries of this field uses packet capture to capture documents in route between a server and client. However, packet capture requires the ability to mirror and capture traffic between a server and a client, typically requiring an interface into networking equipment. Conversely, an embedded agent in the client that sends the rendered document to a server for analysis can be delivered with the document and is easier to deploy and update. Additionally and importantly, the document a browser renders may not exactly match the document that was sent by a server, for example, as it was modified by client side browser plugins, proxies, or network devices along the way.
For a server to detect content that was viewed by a user at client side browser, the client may have to send the entire document. In a mobile environment, clients such as mobile devices may be limited in computing resources, including storage, memory, processors, and the like. Mobile devices often encounter challenges with communication with wireless networks, such as bandwidth constraints and network speed. Systems that communicate with clients to receive the entire document viewed on a client, such as a mobile device, may be severely burdened by the constraints of a mobile environment. Further, sending an entire client-received document to a server may be inefficient and may, for example, slow down the user experience while the client is consuming network resources uploading the document. Additional techniques can look for duplication of content and use compression techniques to reduce the amount of content sent. However, such techniques are overburdened with resending the entire document and consuming too many network and client processing resources.